We all remember how awful Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events was. No, not the Netflix version that seems to be doing well. I’m talking about the one with Jim Carrey in it. R.L. Stine is none too pleased about his version of the character, and he actually blames him for the franchise tanking before it even had a chance to prosper.
Though he hasn’t had anything to say about Neil Patrick Harris’s performance in the Netflix series which has done well and it shooting its second season, he did have this to say about Carrey in a recent interview with EW:
“A really horrible movie can ruin a book franchise, look what happened to the Lemony Snicket books. Jim Carrey just ruined it. He was so awful. It’s weird, they can’t really translate it because Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler, is one of the funniest people on earth. I was on a panel with him, and afterwards, I swore I would never go on a panel with him again. He finished every one of my jokes. He was hilarious!”
The honest opinion of he gave on the comedian’s performance in the movie was in response to Entertainment Weekly asking Stine who he would prefer to portray him in a biopic. Jack Black seems to be at the top of that list as he pointed out that he did so well in the first Goosebumps movie. It’s clear he liked that film quite a bit, and so did Sony, because a sequel is already in the works for next year.
“Come on! Jack Black already played me! How lucky was I that the movie turned out good?”
Beside the bitterness over Jim Carrey’s portrayal, other topics were covered during the interview. One of the most interesting bits was that he is a fan of one of Stephen King’s novels in particular, and he doesn’t feel any remorse for ripping it off five separate times. He had this to say about the novel:
“Pet Sematary by Stephen King is the all-time creepiest. I’ve stolen that plot about five times, I had to!”
Afterwards, he shared that he is binge-watching Netflix’s Bloodline series, his fictional character of choice to protect him during a zombie apocalypse is Jack Reacher, and that The Girl On the Train is a highly overrated book.
Surprisingly, he stated that he has to buy all of his own books if he wants a copy for any reason, as his publisher doesn’t send them to him. No, he doesn’t buy them for posterity, but he has a good reason for buying so many:
“I do it all the time! People are very polite. They don’t say anything. Publishers are cheap, so I always have to buy my own stuff. I do it constantly. I give away a lot of books, like for school auctions, we’ll give away a set of 10 autographed Goosebumps books. So I buy Goosebumps all the time.”
What isn’t surprising is that horror movies don’t tend to scare him. Instead, he sees them more as comedies. Since he is a horror writer, that makes sense.